I'm in the process of setting up a hybrid system that has multiple hard drives. As much as I'd like to have them raided, I don't want to spend the extra cash for a raid controller (unless someone has an inexpensive suggestion). I have a 160GB hard drive for the OS, and 2 identical Seagate 7200 250GB drives for media. Without these drives being raided, if I was just to just throw some media on them, would LMCE be able to pick it up, etc, etc?

Basically I'm wondering how LMCE handles media files on hard drives, especially in the instance of having multiple drives.

I have a 160GB hard drive for the OS, and 2 identical Seagate 7200 250GB drives for media. Without these drives being raided, if I was just to just throw some media on them, would LMCE be able to pick it up, etc, etc?

Sure. Shut the server down, install the two new drives, and assuming you have them set up with a compatible file system, your core will ask you if you want to use the drives after bootup.

You can say Yes, or Yes -> Use LinuxMCE File System

It's easier to let LinuxMCE utilize the drives with the LinuxMCE File system....

Now when you browse your media by Filename, you'll see two extra boxes, one for each drive.

I think, though, if your users are copying files to the core over Samba Shares, they still have to pay attention to which drive they are using. Which means, I don't believe they can just load up their main share and have LinuxMCE spread the contents around all 3 drives you'll have.

The good news is, if you sort your media by Title and use the filters, from that point of view, it makes no difference to the GUI what drive your files are stored on.

The wiki has a detailed page of info relating to how media files are organized:

So is it just better to install the OS on one drive, without having the 2 media drives even installed? Then afterwards, power down, install the drives, raid them in BIOS, and boot up? Will LMCE recognize the BIOS raid automatically as if it was one drive?

do NOT use the BIOS facilities to raid the drives!DO NOT USE THE BIOS FACILITIES TO RAID THE DRIVES!

LinuxMCE has a built in facility for doing RAID. so install the system drive...install the software on it...then connect the other disks..and use the web admin to set them up using LinuxMCE's RAID facility.

Ok, I got the OS installed on one drive and working as I want it. Now I enabled the other two drives, the two that I want to raid, but one has a bunch of junk on it. So I go into the KDE desktop, to to the disk and file system utility, select the drive, and now it's asking me what mount point I want, and I'm not sure what a good choice would be for the LMCE file system. Annnd...can I just drag/drop media onto the raided drive when I'm finished LMCE will sort it out? Or how exactly does adding media work?

On the mount points. Now it is time for the automount to do it's magic.

What should happen is that your core discovers the new drives and on the media director asks if you want to use it. You should respond yes. Then I usually say to just use pluto's structure (/public|user_n/data/*) as that is most convenient. Now what happens is that the automount will mount the drive on /mnt/device/NN where NN is the device number - when the drive is accessed. Also you should see some links to the mount point under /home/public/data/*. Here examples from my system that has 2 NFS shares and one additional internal drive: